George Hamilton (Getty Images / August 4, 2009) |
E-mail
Print
George Hamilton burst on the scene in the final days of Old Hollywood - one of his first credits was Vincente Minnelli's "Home From the Hill" (1960). He soon embodied all the fashion-plate allure of big-studio stardom with his own glints of humor and hedonism. He learned the studios' lessons about swank, verve and glamour without swallowing them whole. Irony became him - and becomes him. Over the past five decades, he's gone from youthful bon vivant to silver fox without losing his je ne sais quoi.
With his print autobiography, "Don't Mind If I Do," and the autobiographical fiction of "My One and Only" (the film version of Hamilton's childhood stories, for which he was executive producer), the actor known widely for his tan has revealed new facets to the world.
In the filmed-in- Maryland critical hit, Renee Zellweger portrays Hamilton's real-life mother as an offbeat 1950s heroine. She walks out on an unfaithful bandleader husband ( Kevin Bacon) and embarks on a nationwide old-boyfriend tour to find a stepfather for her sons.
"Charlie Peters wrote the script 10, 15 years ago or longer," Hamilton says over the phone from Los Angeles. "And it was written because I told Merv Griffin about my life and this incident with my mother. ... We were living in New York, and my mother got a TripTik AAA map and marked it with a green felt-tip marker and took us all over the country. We thought of it as an adventure. My brothers and I - there were three of us, not just two [as in the movie] - all left school, and my mother sold a lot of stuff so she could get some money."
"I knew what my job was, it was very clear and delineated: I was to be the man in the family, I was the one who had to take care of the money. I was the quartermaster. And we went across the United States in a Lincoln Continental, not a Cadillac. From one town to the next, she saw these men she'd had love affairs with. She'd say of one, 'Oh, he was divine, he won the Harvard-Yale game for Yale,' and we'd get there and she'd come out of the restaurant and say, 'Oh, my God ... he's let himself go.' One after another was like that."
Hamilton didn't come to Baltimore for the filming of this story - he got the impression that Zellweger didn't want to see the family photographs or memorabilia or hear tapes of his mother. But he describes the film, which opened earlier this month, with proprietary pride. "The '50s were a much more forgiving time. There was optimism in the characters then. And that's one reason Renee is so wonderful: She has that optimism about her."
"My One and Only" brings home the plight of women bred only to be wives before the feminist revolution. "I think Charlie Peters knew that from the beginning," Hamilton says. "My direction on the movie was more about what a woman would do to keep a family together, even have a loveless marriage. And then, these things fused."
With humorous candor, Hamilton says of his mother and brothers, "I'm sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with the alliance we formed at the time. But at the end we all very much cared about each other and covered each other's backs. My older brother was much more talented than I, and better-looking than I, too. And both my mother and brother wanted to be movie stars; that was all they really wanted. Both had a shot at it; both of them blew it. I didn't want it, I wanted to be a doctor.
"But in a strange way I had this desire from the age of 12 on to give them what they wanted. I knew that my job wouldn't be completed until I did it. So I wrote a book about them and had the movie written about them. In some strange way in my subconscious I knew that's what I was here to do. And now I feel like I'm kind of liberated and all of a sudden on my own and I've got to come up with a whole new life."
With his print autobiography, "Don't Mind If I Do," and the autobiographical fiction of "My One and Only" (the film version of Hamilton's childhood stories, for which he was executive producer), the actor known widely for his tan has revealed new facets to the world.
In the filmed-in- Maryland critical hit, Renee Zellweger portrays Hamilton's real-life mother as an offbeat 1950s heroine. She walks out on an unfaithful bandleader husband ( Kevin Bacon) and embarks on a nationwide old-boyfriend tour to find a stepfather for her sons.
"Charlie Peters wrote the script 10, 15 years ago or longer," Hamilton says over the phone from Los Angeles. "And it was written because I told Merv Griffin about my life and this incident with my mother. ... We were living in New York, and my mother got a TripTik AAA map and marked it with a green felt-tip marker and took us all over the country. We thought of it as an adventure. My brothers and I - there were three of us, not just two [as in the movie] - all left school, and my mother sold a lot of stuff so she could get some money."
"I knew what my job was, it was very clear and delineated: I was to be the man in the family, I was the one who had to take care of the money. I was the quartermaster. And we went across the United States in a Lincoln Continental, not a Cadillac. From one town to the next, she saw these men she'd had love affairs with. She'd say of one, 'Oh, he was divine, he won the Harvard-Yale game for Yale,' and we'd get there and she'd come out of the restaurant and say, 'Oh, my God ... he's let himself go.' One after another was like that."
Hamilton didn't come to Baltimore for the filming of this story - he got the impression that Zellweger didn't want to see the family photographs or memorabilia or hear tapes of his mother. But he describes the film, which opened earlier this month, with proprietary pride. "The '50s were a much more forgiving time. There was optimism in the characters then. And that's one reason Renee is so wonderful: She has that optimism about her."
"My One and Only" brings home the plight of women bred only to be wives before the feminist revolution. "I think Charlie Peters knew that from the beginning," Hamilton says. "My direction on the movie was more about what a woman would do to keep a family together, even have a loveless marriage. And then, these things fused."
With humorous candor, Hamilton says of his mother and brothers, "I'm sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with the alliance we formed at the time. But at the end we all very much cared about each other and covered each other's backs. My older brother was much more talented than I, and better-looking than I, too. And both my mother and brother wanted to be movie stars; that was all they really wanted. Both had a shot at it; both of them blew it. I didn't want it, I wanted to be a doctor.
"But in a strange way I had this desire from the age of 12 on to give them what they wanted. I knew that my job wouldn't be completed until I did it. So I wrote a book about them and had the movie written about them. In some strange way in my subconscious I knew that's what I was here to do. And now I feel like I'm kind of liberated and all of a sudden on my own and I've got to come up with a whole new life."
Digg
Twitter
Facebook
StumbleUpon
